"Don't confuse stubbornness and selfishness with strength."
~ Reader Comment, The Guardian
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If you want to see and hear something different, type in on Google,
putin blueberry hill.
What comes up is a 4:30 video titled, "Singing PM: 'Fats' Putin over the top of 'Blueberry Hill' with piano solo..."
It's some kind of charity event to benefit children; there are some Hollywood people in the audience. President Putin, with musicians, back-up singers, and his own arrangement of the number, gives his interpretation of the 1950s Fats Domino hit song "Blueberry Hill."
He plays the song's main melody line on the piano at the beginning -- an elementary version, no chords. He wants to follow the Domino performance, or pay homage to it...
His English is strongly accented -- "but all of those vohs we mayed -- where nehv-air to be..."
I watched this video several times.
Tried to imagine how Vladimir Putin came to be influenced by this sentimental, sweet song -- it's clear that he loves it.
I was thinking, well, Putin was born in 1952, Fats Domino put the song out in 1956 -- Putin would have been four. Maybe an older brother or sister bought the record and they played it a lot, or maybe they heard it on the radio. (In that era, with the Cold War at its most intense, did Soviet people have radios? Was American music played on their radio stations?...)
And it turns out, with research we learn -- Fats Domino was not the originator of that song -- it was published in 1940, music written by Vincent Rose, & lyrics by Larry Stock and Al Lewis. That year, the song was recorded six times -- The Glenn Miller Orchestra had a Number One hit with it.
Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1949, and charted in Billboard's Top 40. (Louis Armstrong then was like Willie Nelson, now -- sang every song there is....)
A little more consideration on the topic of Vladimir Putin and the song "Blueberry Hill" -- Putin doesn't speak fluent English, so when he listens to this song, the impact is not the same as if you or I listen to it. We hear the melody, and the story the lyrics tell, and the sentiment they express.
The lyrics aren't going to make a difference to Putin -- when he performed it, he was singing phonetically -- he is enchanted by the melody, and what musicians call the "soul" of the work.
An example of how music speaks to us on multiple levels.
At the end of President Putin's performance, he walks over to a tall guitar player behind him and shakes hands with him and kisses his cheek, European-style. As he walks away, the next musician by the guitar player has this watchful, dubious look, like he's wondering if Vlad is going to kiss him too....
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Mueller indictment (continued)
Stolen Documents Released through DCLeaks
35. More than a month before the release of any documents, the Conspirators constructed the online persona DCLeaks to release and publicize stolen election-related documents. On or about April 19, 2016, after attempting to register the domain electionleaks.com, the Conspirators registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymized the registrant.
The funds used to pay for the dcleaks.com domain originated from an account at an online cryptocurrency service that the Conspirators also used to fund the lease of a virtual private server registered with the operational email account dirbinsaabol@mail.com.
The dirbinsaabol email account was also used to register the john356gh URL-shortening account used by LUKASHEV to spearphish the Clinton Campaign chairman and other campaign-related individuals.
36. On or about June 8, 2016, the Conspirators launched the public website dcleaks.com, which they used to release stolen emails. Before it shut down in or around March 2017, the site received over one million page views. The Conspirators falsely claimed on the site that DCLeaks was started by a group of "American hacktivists," when in fact it was started by the Conspirators.
37. Starting in or around June 2016 and continuing through the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators used DCLeaks to release emails stolen from individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators also released documents they had stolen in other spearphishing operations, including those they had conducted in 2015 that collected emails from individuals affiliated with the Republican Party.
38. On or about June 8, 2016, and at approximately the same time that the dcleaks.com website was launched, the Conspirators created a DCLeaks Facebook page using a preexisting social media account under the fictitious name "Alice Donovan."
In addition to the DCLeaks Facebook page, the Conspirators used other social media accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. persons such as "Jason Scott" and "Richard Gingrey" to promote the DCLeaks website. The Conspirators accessed these accounts from computers managed by POTEMKIN and his co-conspirators.
39. On or about June 8, 2016, the Conspirators created the Twitter account @dcleaks. The Conspirators operated the @dcleaks Twitter account from the same computer used for other efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
For example, the Conspirators used the same computer to operate the Twitter account @BaltimoreIsWhr, through which they encouraged U.S. audiences to "[j]oin our flash mob" opposing Clinton and to post images with the hashtag #BlacksAgainstHillary.
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(to be continued...)
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